Topic: Audio Business

MATERIAL:

please keep in mind that this info is probably something that Mosfet got from the audiophile text train and my answering is more of an in general one and not pointed at our tuning colleague

"IF CONE VIBRATION CAUSES THE ENCLOSURE TO RESONATE, THAT IS LOST ENERGY THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN USED TO VIBRATE THE AIR (conservation of energy)."

Why is it that audiophiles believe this?

Pluck a string and you will not hear much. Pluck a string attached to a guitar and you will hear tons.

Suspend a speaker in air and play something through it and you will not hear much. Attach a speaker to a cabinet and you will hear tons.

Where is the disconnect in the audiophile mind that doesn't get it? The movement of air alone doesn't produce sound. There must be a mechanical stimulus. No matter what type of frame or box is used to attach the driver to it is a part of the driver itself (mechanically). All someone has to do is try it so why do audiophiles get so hung up on non-truths? I have never in my whole life not heard the mechanical effect of one thing touching another in this industry. it's what I have built my whole life on. In fact as we study molecules we can see how this exchange works to provide all forms of matter and energy. But wait, then the audiophile calls any vibration that happens outside of their understanding "distortion". What Question Who pulled this non-sense out of midair.

Let me be very clear to those who are questioning this. If you had a speaker hooked up in midair and you had nothing to resonant after the speaker moved the air you would hear very little. Don't take my word for it, do it. We did! The audiophile world is full of myths that have absolutely no legs. No logical or scientific foundation. It's talk, but enough are saying it that people have excepted (only in this little crowd) as truth.

So let me rewrite this.

IF CONE VIBRATION CAUSES THE ENCLOSURE TO RESONATE, THAT IS a gain of ENERGY THAT increases the amount of volume TO VIBRATE THE AIR (amplification of energy).

Simple experiment: take your electric razor and turn it on outside with no walls around, or trees, or buildings, or close to the ground and listen to it a yard away from your ear. Not much sound! Turn it off, take it indoors and turn it on. Huge jump in amplification. Now set it turned on, on top of the back of a guitar. Huge jump again. This is called amplification. This is not distortion!! Exclamation Idea Very Happy cheers

Amplification : a natural or artificial device intended to make a signal stronger

EE audio designers egos are so big they can't except what is being taught over in the physics class as reality. They have gone down the wrong path for so long that they have removed themselves from the hobby of listening to the whole picture and made their quest marginalized at best. They must find the answer to audio in some other way besides nature. I'm telling you guys the absolute truth here. Look around at who these guys are, their scary. The bulk of the talkers in this industry are not in touch with logic. they really believe that on a moving planet there are fixed answers and they have them and no one else does. They have the example of musical instruments (in their same field of music) to follow and they won't. Go to the shows and see for yourselves. When ever there is something wrong with the sound they are blaming someone else and not taking any of the blame. I know, remember I was Mr. tweak who had to come in and try to make their sound work. Over the years I've had to put up with a bunch of cry babies, no kidding. I've walked into peoples rooms with a simple setup and blown theirs away not to make them feel bad, but to make music happen when their system couldn't. I've try my absolute best to make bad sounding badly designed stuff sound at least full range all my life but the facts are still the facts. In tuning we do stuff that transcends systems way past what these fixed, limited engineered components and speakers can even dream of doing.

Keep in mind I tune. I don't claim that the way I may want the sound of my guitar is better than your way. I just show you how to tune and guide you to the most tunable products I can find. Sometimes I spend so much time biting my tongue that my friends wonder when it's going to fall off. I know that many thousands of people wanted to believe in all these stories of great expensive components being built and talked about by the industries audio lords to be true. Magazines were made into empires and climbing the latter to the top was the ultimate achievement. And then, reality hit and many found themselves with prototypes made into products before they ever delivered the "whole sonic picture". The pressure of audiophile guilt was applied so stepping back into the real world would be looked at as a down grade. The truth of it has turned out to show that most in the hobby bought boat anchors, pretty ads, glowing articles and globs of rubber.

I say thank God the myths of the 80s, 90s and early turn are all but gone. Fortunes were spent on junk but maybe a few will actually survive to find the truth of their hobby. This is about things that vibrate and vibration is a good and pure thing. We just need to learn how to free it up and play it. Our intellect doesn't go on the shelf we just get to explore more relevant topics like electrodynamics, electromagnetics, harmonic balancing, mechanical transfer and many more. Basically discovering tuning and how it increases performance. If I could click my figures right now and make it happen I would make your system so simple as compared to what they are and make them highly tunable without blockage. As much as we all talk on here I still see tons of blockage being listened to all for the sake of things that don't work and aren't needed. And if it's not needed it's hurting the sound.

MATERIAL:

Through these last few months the power of the tuning tools have proved to be the champions of sound once more. At times the closer I moved toward high end audio the further away from the music I got. On the other hand the closer I moved toward simplicity and full range designed components the more the music took on the character of real, full and believable.

How do I describe the last year without beating up on some well known designers and their products? Honestly I don't know! Maybe I should be delicate and say "if you only want part" of the sound keep buying into what the high end forums, rags and designers are feeding you. As much fun as it was to explore these small pieces of the total picture when compared to a full range setup like the Pioneer/mag/60's there was little to brag about let alone salvage from the sound. Many have come to trust me as having good ears and knowing how to setup systems, but can one really believe that the simple setup I have been using can out perform the "audiophile cat's meow"? Evidence of this can be heard by going to the Vegas CES then visiting my place, or and even better hearing the before and after stories of my recent visits and listening sessions at my place, the tunable room, Drewsters place and Sean's. In all four of these places the simple setups of the mag/pioneer/mga speakers cleared the table and cleaned the map with the high end.

the audiophile setups

There was in all cases an extreme loss of musical pace in the audiophile setups that made the music for myself unable to take seriously. Soundstages were tiny and thin and there were holes all through the music to the point of missing instruments and important music cues. I spent much time trying to bring out the music but as soon as I found one part another would come up missing. It was like pulling audio teeth and made me wonder why would designers build equipment so lacking in the total picture. It was similar to my experiences with over damped equipment after removing the weight to find that the components didn't have what it takes to make music. Shallow thin and constantly heading toward bright is what I ran into. All of the information that was music kept disappearing into this cloud of high pitch distortion. Basically my impression was "nothing new". The same ole lack of musical vision from a group of people who evidently don't know how to setup a system as a whole and designing with limited parameters.

the approved tune systems

Music! This pretty much sums it up. The right and wrongs disappear as the music takes over. The first noticeable difference is the range of the sound top to bottom as if someone turn on the music lights making it able to see a holistic picture. I remember letting others tell me their thoughts before I jumped in as I did not want to preprogram any minds. The looks on the faces told the story clearly. The basic revelation was like eating a piece of pie or having the whole thing and indulging, with milk, and ice cream, after eating a steak meal. I will get around to writing on the Pioneer 3400 & Mag 2100 combo in which I will name names for comparisons, but in the meantime I think it's important for us to get our heads on straight and take a look at what sound is and how the audio chain produces it. Also taking a look at the tools of the tune being far more valuable than some of the number games that are being thrown around in our digital age. Much of this comes down to the rule of simplisty and how our electrical systems do not like adding parts. This doesn't explain everything away but it's a start. The other very important issue is, if you don't have a good source you will never correct it further down the chain.

I do remember the shift from recievers to separates, and the shift from "bells and whistles" to straight forward. My thoughts on back then and now is that the industry is still full of experimenting.

do I remember the change?

As far as the other part of this change that took place back in the turn from recievers and toys to separates not using tone or balance, I would have to say a ton of this was based on marketing and ego. I can remember people sitting there with the most God awful sounding high end systems with all of us covering our ears. Sadly these same guys had fairly nice sounding systems before they took the high end plunge. Remember these guys went from systems that had speakers in the corners of the room, and the room sounded like music. They would play around with placement but in a different way. I had many friends with these systems and the tonal balance was actually pretty cool. It was cloudy but very toe tapping. More of a party system. The more exotic systems were either horns (corner loaded), PA systems, or some AR and Advent systems. All these systems had their own thing, but none captured the whole. When High End Audio came in if you had any of the old school you were looked at odd. Certain parts of the old school were looked down upon quickly and perminately. It's when people stopped reading Julian Hersh and started reading Harry P and JGH. Stereoreview and Audio were put to the back and Stereophile and TAS were moved to the front. The shift seemed like it was going from Popular Mechanics to Rolling Stone in feel. But with selling magazines what the public doesn't know is it is all about a story and not neccessarilly accurate accounting. Hobbyist became writers and the new breed of rags found the formula for turning on a new listener.

As the snob factor went up in this male driven hobby so did the sense of dictated right and wrong. The listeners didn't stand a chance and the "amp of the month club" was born and things moved so fast that most designers barely got new products ready for the press or the Bi-yearly shows. I knew many of these guys personally and can remember how their products were set by the timing of reviews and shows. Made sense for a budding industry but terrible sense for the art itself. All someone had to say was tone controls and balance was part of the old school and you saw products follow suit like scared kids. Audiophile myths started coming out of the woodwork and so did black-balling any manufacturer who didn't want to play. There was very little about this that was actually about better sound. It became more about social standing and I was warned more than once about how it worked, but for me it was too late. When RoomTune hit it was so needed that the designers, reviewers and listeners came running. RoomTune was one of those products that didn't offend and was a sonic help for cheap. Plus I wanted to see everyone jam so I traveled like a fool tunee man. While traveling I saw hundreds of closets stacked full of the old school. People didn't even bother to sell them at first they were in too big of a hurry to buy the latest Stereophile recommended component. I kid you not it was that bad and I was booked solid trying to make these systems sound good for both reviewer and listener. You can not imagine what I went through to get those grill clothes off and speakers moved into the room. And the WAF became a battle cry for those ego driven guys who didn't want to admit that they had bad sound. They would rather give the reasons why they had bad sound but never changed out components that would actually work sitting in the same place. The ego was thick as gel and I would walk in to these setups that sounded remarkably bad and be expected to do the RoomTuning Miracle. Sonic it was so bad that people started calling the company as if it was a standard for me to come tune their acoustics after they spent a fortune as if the service was free. I'm not kidding, they treated me like I came with the deal. Unbelievable egos!

as far as bottom to top goes though it went like this

you have a reciever, your out
you have an integrated, your a junior member but under review
separate pre and amp, almost there
separate pre, amp and monos, your in the camp

This had nothing to do with sound and everything to do with climbing the ladder of status. Keep in mind the American and world mindset at this time. We bought things that made us fit into a class and not by what it actually was. I can not count high enough to tell you how many guys I had talk to me about them buying a piece they never heard before and they were spending ridiculous prices for. And as soon as they did the model changed they'd be in line for the next model. Some of these guys never even opened the box before moving on. This was not about a method of listening but about a compulsive buyer marketing plan. By this time the tone control, EQ, horn speakers and anything under $2000 were not considered in. It was literally like being a biker and not owning a Harley.

Bill, what an excellent write up! Thank you for taking the time (5 years ago) to write this. I'll share this page with some of the guys I rub shoulders with at the local audio group; I think at least a couple will grasp what is written here.

The more and more I read through this forum (I'm almost finished actually), the more I realize that what I've been striving for, for years is all based on a misunderstanding of how to reproduce music. I've wasted thousands listening to other people instead of actually trying to understand why what I was buying isn't giving me that audio insight I'm looking for. And you've nailed it. Thanks again.


Best,
Steven